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Blogging 101

Blogging is one of the most effective ways to draw attention to your brand online, provided you do it correctly. Sadly, too many people don’t know how to blog properly. Many would-be bloggers think you merely have to relay your thoughts into a well-worded piece and success will come. Successful blogging is a little more complicated than that, but thankfully it’s not too complicated. Stick with the following tips and you’ll soon find blogging success.

Why Blog?

Your primary goal when blogging is to draw attention to your brand, but what does that really mean? Essentially, a successful blog will draw readers from various sources. Those readers will share the blog with others, growing the blog’s readership. And all of those readers will leave comments in droves. When new visitors land on your blog and they see useful entries with lots of comments, they will be more inclined to become a reader themselves and they’ll want to leave their own comments.

All of this activity will ultimately lead to more traffic to your website and more sales for your bottom line. Now we’re back to square one. How do you write an effective blog, how do you drive the much-needed traffic to your blog and how to do you entice all those readers to leave comments?

First, you need to research your audience.

Your Primary Audience

A successful blogger understands the audience the blog will pertain to. The blogger understands the audience’s desires, the problems they may be facing and, most importantly, a successful blogger always knows what questions the audience wants to ask most. It is with this knowledge that the blogger will craft engaging and thought-provoking blogs that never fail to attract readers and comments.

This will require lots of market research, as well as keyword research. You need to know what keyword terms your audience is searching for, along with the primary questions and problems they’re facing, and you will have what you need to write successful blogs.

After conducting this research, you should be able to come up with a list of attention-grabbing titles that contain the most popular keywords in your niche. Once you have these titles, start visiting other blogs in your niche to see what your competition is doing.

Learn From Others

If you want to be successful at anything, you should learn to emulate those who have enjoyed success before you. Conduct an online search for blogs in your niche. Try to find successful blogs with lots of posts, readers and comments. Find out what subjects are most popular and try to get a sense of why the blog is laid out like it is. If you can glean the best aspects of each blog you come across and if you can apply those aspects to your blog and expand on them, you might find that your blog steals your competition’s traffic, bringing you the success you were hoping for.

A Little Personality Never Hurts

When writing your blogs, be different. Even if the subject matter is the same as all the other blogs in your niche, try to come up with a unique angle. Include your personality so that people see that there is an actual person behind your brand. This allows your audience to get to know you on a more personal level. This will eventually build familiarity and trust that can do wonders for your conversion rates.

Formatting

When writing your blogs, pay attention to how the words are laid out on the page. If you write big blocks of text, nobody is going to take the time to read what you’ve written. Instead, break the content up so that it’s much easier on the eyes. Use short, concise paragraphs and break the paragraphs up with bolded subheaders. Another tip you can use to make the content much more easily digestible is to use bullet points.

If you can effectively break your content up so that it’s organized and easy on the reader’s eyes, you’ll increase the chances that readers will actually read your blogs to the very end.

Don’t Forget Your Photos And Alt Tags

Photos make your blogs more visually appealing, they help to break the content up even further when you use more than one and it sets you apart from your competition. Choose one or two photos for each blog entry and don’t forget the alt tags. The search engines love blogs, but search engine crawlers can’t ‘read’ photos. Alt tags help search engines learn what your photos are depicting, which in turn helps them identify and rank your blogs in the search engine results pages.

Entice The Comments

When you come to the end of your blog, you’ll want to urge your readers to leave comments. You might ask them a question, you might leave them with an intriguing thought or you might just come out and ask them to leave one. The more comments your blogs have, the more readers your blogs will attract and the more success you’ll enjoy as a blog writer.

Share Your Blogs

Once each blog is written, spread the word by sharing each entry on your various social networking profiles. The more you share, the higher your readership will climb and the more traffic will flow to your blog and website. This is how you write and manage a successful blog. Now all you have to do is start.

Do you have any blog writing tips you’d like to share to help our other readers? Let’s hear it, bloggers. What do you do to set yourself apart?